The past month I've been reading up on the BSD's, and since my daily driver laptop was running out of space I decided to do a clean install of FreeBSD onto it.

I prefer the BSD's more intentional design over Linux chaos and I enjoyed playing with it and tweaking it.

My only problem was that my laptop was overheating like crazy. The chassis got so hot that I could barely type on the built in keyboard.

Since this is my daily laptop I couldn't afford tweaking my config any longer but I tried all the stuff in the FreeBSD forums and what I could find in Reddit threads, without any luck. So for now I went back to Devuan with Sysvinit.

Has anyone managed to get FreeBSD running on modern laptop hardware without these kinds of thermal issues? Is there a solution? I would really like to play with BSD more on real hardware and not just in VMs.

Thanks for the guidance in advance.

I don't know how do you expect anyone to help you when you gave no relevant information on your hardware except that your laptop is overheating.

It could be that zfs is using a lot of resources because it's intensive so you could try installing freebsd with ufs and setting „powerd_enable="YES"‟ in rc.conf.

Though, it's merely a guess without the model name and the specs of your laptop.

I also use Devuan and happen to be considering FreeBSD.

Have you tried enabling powerd and then rebooting?
It's really hard to try to help if you don't tell us what you already tried to fix the issue.